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I am hoping that it is not necessary for me to be a rocket scientist to automate some special situation trades. Forex is a treasure trove of special situation opportunities! The problem: I am not fast enough to trade them manually mostly because it works best to trade these opportunities with multiple pairs.
At this point I have these pieces developed:
The ability to continuously scan across 20+ pairs
Various custom regressions and automatic algebraic trendlines
And most importantly several solid concepts.
I do not trust MT4 for backtesting since many of my concepts do not require stops exceeding 10 to 15 pips. I also want a portable solution so moving to an external dll seems to be required. Looks like my limited C and Pascal capabilities will need to be upgraded before I can continue.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Start off with MT4 to prove the concept in a backtested EA then look to replicate with standalone code or a more solid platform.
But yes its a lot of work. Some brokers (Interactive) will provide you decent APIs (C#/Java) for order generation, instrument definition and historical / live data subscription etc...
I have been able to define the swing highs/lows so you should be able to also. You can also do a lot of things with them that make much more sense than the traditional indicators. Other than trying to use some unique regression stuff to quantify what my eyes are seeing, I do not use any indicators.
If you are going to pursue FX, ditching the indicators might be a good idea. For me, the indicators took my attention away from the bars on the chart where the real information is. But everyone is different so definitely pursue your own path.
I believe that my stops will be too tight for backtesting on the 1 minute bars. Perhaps not. Perhaps it can still be used to validate the concept, then I would have to port it to test the desired stop placements.
Yes, Oanda also has an API plus I want to add at least one more broker. The goal of moving to direct APIs makes more sense to me than trading through MT4, MultiCharts, NeoTicker, NinjaTrader, etc.
I am trading in semi auto mode because as of yet, I still am not fully satisfied with the accuracy of the signal identification of my code, but I have made some progress lately when I have time to play with the code. The only thing that is not automated is the pulling of the trigger, because a percentage of the signals identified by code are not valid as my brain sees them. This is due to the fact that my method is pretty visual.
Yeah semi-auto is great also. basically what I mean when I say I agree with the original poster is you need a system. Either you pull the trigger (and are very accurate) or the computer does, but either way, if the system is tested + obeyed its a recipe for success.
Seat of the pants in my experience, is not!! You may be different but I can't hold my nerve when discretionary trading. Unless its one of those screaming buy moments like oil at $35 : )
Ok I'm making my first foray into Ninjatrader. I've been backtesting using R then later OpenQuant (evaluation) looking for a trading platform to make that first auto trade. I'm currently using NT as I am impressed with the support/community, however I am not impressed with how buggy it is. Seriously guys, writing software that works is not that hard ...
Here's a printout of one of my strategies in the optimiser. I want to optimise this using Piersh Genetic (I have installed the extension) and maximise the SQN (System Quality Number - again extension). I am testing on NYSE:SSO daily bars (S&P500 leveraged index fund). To my dismay the optimiser outputs only one row. Even when in "Default" mode.
Whats going on here? NT can't be that crap, surely its my mistake.
Hey there, yes I wanted to de-subjectivise this process so I used a slow Fisher Transform (John Elhers) to detect cycle tops/bottoms, then drew a Manhattan chart on the turning points. I'm in the process of researching *how* to use this information in trading systems. I'm thinking a gann based method, like buy new highs, sell new lows. Or at least use previous low (or high) as stop-loss when long (short) and accumulating positions
NT has its issues although I find NT7 to work quite well and to be stable. Trading software you just have know limitations of each vendor. All have pluses and minuses. In many ways comes down to what you need. What I do works great with NT but may not work for someone else. One thing is for sure right strategy you can make a lot of money with NT.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."